Friday Movie Roundup: Horror: Hollywood's Breadwinner

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I just finished reading
Shock Value,
Jason Zinoman's entertaining look at “how a few eccentric outsiders
gave us nightmares, conquered Hollywood and invented modern horror.”

The book celebrates a
genre and group of filmmakers often ghettoized when compared to the
better-known New Hollywood revolution of the 1970s, a rightly
celebrated period and movement — roughly between Arthur
Penn's Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) and Martin
Scorsese's Raging
Bull (1980) — that was investigated in Peter Biskind's
equally entertaining Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Specifically,
Shock Value
pinpoints New Horror as running between Roman
Polanski's Rosemary's
Baby (1968) and Ridley
Scott's Alien
(1979), stopping along the way to discuss such landmark horror films
as George
Romero's Night
of the Living Dead, Wes
Craven's The
Last House on the Left, William
Friedkin's The
Exorcist, Tobe
Hooper's The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, John
Carpenter's Halloween
and
Brian
De Palma's Carrie,
among others.

Zinoman,
a critic and reporter who currently covers theater for The
New York Times,
investigates the often arduous process of making the aforementioned
movies and deftly critiques what has made them such enduring examples
of the genre. He also offers incisive commentary on the psychological
reasons horror movies continue to fascinate us — improbably, the
genre is now the most profitable in Hollywood. (For the record, the
first horror film that scared the shit out of me was The
Beast Within, a B-level
piece of schlock that opens with a scene of a woman being raped by a
beast; I caught it one late night on HBO as an impressionable
11-year-old.)

On
cue,Guillermo
del Toro,
a dedicated New Horror disciple, this
week looks back to one of the genre's lesser-known chillers, the 1973
television movie Don't
Be Afraid of the Dark
— the visionary filmmaker behind such movies as The
Devil's Backbone
and Pan's
Labyrinth
produces and co-writes an updated version that is likely to be much
more effective than the mostly lame horror reboots that have invaded
multiplexes in recent years.

Opening films:

COLOMBIANA
— Zoe Saldana headlines this action-adventure about a “stone-cold
Colombian assassin” who witnessed the murder of her parents when
she was a child. Olivier Megaton directs a script co-written by the
genre's long-running benefactor, Luc Besson. Also stars Michael
Vartan and Cliff Curtis. (Read full review here.) (Opens
wide today.) —tts (Rated R.) Grade: D-plus

THE
DEVIL'S DOUBLE — The devil in this story is Uday
Hussein, the notoriously decadent and monstrous elder son of Iraqi
strongman Saddam Hussein. The story’s double is Latif Yahia, a
valorous Iraqi soldier whose recently published memoir about his
experiences serving as Uday’s body double provides the source
material for this film. Dominic Cooper plays both roles. His
performance would have been a tour de force had there only been
authentic characters here to play. (Read full review here.) (Opens
today at Esquire Theatre.) — Marjorie
Baumgarten (Rated R.) Grade:
C

DON'T
BE AFRAID OF THE DARK — Producer/co-writer Guillermo del
Toro performs the neat trick of adapting the original 1973 television
horror shocker Don't Be
Afraid of the Dark into a tastefully suspenseful work of
kid-friendly art, directed by newcomer Troy Nixey. (Read full review
here.) (Opens wide
today.) — Cole
Smithey (Rated R.) Grade:
B-

THE
GUARD — With a pinch
of Trainspotting
irreverence and a dose of Pulp
Fiction social satire,
debut director John Michael McDonagh cobbles together this lilting
black comedy set in the Gaelic region of County Galway. (Read full
review here.) (Opens
today at Esquire Theatre.)
— CS (Rated
R.) Grade: B

REJOICE
AND SHOUT — Veteran documentary filmmaker Don McGlynn
looks at the 200-year-old history of Gospel music — from its
origins in African-American Christian churches to its impact on
popular music of today. Features a raft of archival footage and
numerous interviews with those in the know. (Opens
today at Mariemont Theatre.) — JG
(Rated PG.) Review coming soon.